Quantum Disqualification

Programmer Lin Shen watches his colleagues collectively pixelate and vanish during a video conference. In his eyes, a coffee stain splits into quantum code. Xinghai City, woven from data, is gripped by a “cognitive plague”: convenience-store AI announces a death countdown in Japanese, data streams overwrite his parents' faces in his childhood photos, and the highest-level access command for the quantum computer Tianshu is engraved deep in his irises. As human bodies begin displaying 404 errors, he must tear open the world's outer shell and prove, amid drone attacks and altered memories, that the greatest lie in this war between reality and illusion is that humans believe themselves to be alive.